While it’s always a bit dangerous to
challenge someone on what he considers to be his his home turf, I
wonder whether Dr. Nelson Lebo III’s abandonment of the notion of
sustainability has less to do with that idea not being as motivating as
he had hoped, versus the march from triumph to triumph of disposable
products and planned obsolescence. It’s far more work than it used to be
to buck that trend, and most people are ever more time stressed. But
people also fall prey to conformity. Do you really need a new phone
every two years? Or to churn your other devices as often as you do?
People are horrified to see how antique my cell phone is, and I find their disapproval comical.

But
Lebo’s reading is based on a sense that individuals are pulling in
their focus to me, mine, and my family. It’s reminiscent of a
conversation I had with a friend who is the ex-wife of a billionaire,
now living modestly and teaching calculus as an adjunct at a local
college. She said:

I can’t get concerned any more
about tragedies. We have billions of people living on this planet who
are going to die because it can’t support them. I used to care about
people dying in Guatemala but now I think that saving lives now means
more deaths later. I know it sounds selfish but I’ve decided to care
about science and my family and not much else.

I wonder how widely her sort of thinking is shared.

By Raúl Ilargi Meijer, editor-in-chief of The Automatic Earth. Originally published at Automatic EarthThis
is another essay from our friend Dr. Nelson Lebo III in New Zealand.
Nelson is a certified expert in everything to do with resilience,
especially how to build a home and a community designed to withstand
disasters, be they natural or man-made, an earthquake or Baltimore.
Aware that he may rub quite a few people the wrong way, he explains here
why he has shifted from seeing what he does in the context of
sustainability, to that of resilience. There’s something profoundly dark
in that shift, but it’s not all bad.

Nelson Lebo III:
Sustainability is so 2007. Those were the heady days before the Global
Financial Crisis, before $2-plus/litre petrol here in New Zealand,
before the failed Copenhagen Climate Summit, before the Christchurch
earthquakes, before the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP)…the
list continues.

Since 2008, informed conversations on the economy,
the environment, and energy have shifted from ‘sustainability’ to
‘resilience’. There are undoubtedly many reasons for this shift, but
I’ll focus on just two: undeniable trends and a loss of faith. Let me
explain.

Since 2008, most of the pre-existing trends in income
inequality, extreme weather events and energy price volatility have
ramped up. Sustainability is about halting and reversing these trends,
but there is essentially no evidence of that type of progress, and in
fact the data shows the opposite.

Plenty of quantitative data
exists for the last seven years to document these accelerated trends,
the most obvious is the continually widening gap between rich and poor
everyone else. The second wave of commentary on the Baltimore riots
(after the superficiality of the mainstream media) has been about the
lack of economic activity and opportunity in many of the largely
African-American neighbourhoods.

Greek and Roman myths are violent and ugly, sure. But apologizing for art — especially the classics — is a bad idea

A
band of enraged women tear a young king limb from limb. An eagle eats
the liver – over and over again — of a god, chained to a mountain, who
was foolish enough to help out human beings. A distraught king lays his
own mother and rips out his own eyes. Rapes happen nearly as often as
the sun rises. The wife of an emperor poisons her rivals. Another
emperor has sex with one of his sisters and pimps out the others. And on
and on.

If you read ancient myths, plays, or
histories this is the kind of thing that comes up again and again. (Some
of the operas or television adaptations – see “I, Claudius” — made of
this stuff is even gnarlier or more graphic.) If you’ve had an
old-fashioned kind of liberal arts education – the kind where you either
chose or were forced to take “western civ” class heavy on Euripides,
Ovid and other Greek and Roman classics – these are mostly images you
already know. In a lot of American high schools, you probably read the
Oedipus plays and maybe the Yeats poem “Leda and the Swan.” You probably
studied mythology – though probably a version as sanitized as the
softened-up Grimms tales you were offered – in elementary school.

But
these days, it seems, this stuff needs special handling. Four students
at Columbia University – the school that pioneered the core curriculum
based around the classics – wrote in the college paper:

Ovid’s
‘Metamorphoses’ is a fixture of Lit Hum, but like so many texts in the
Western canon, it contains triggering and offensive material that
marginalizes student identities in the classroom. These texts, wrought
with histories and narratives of exclusion and oppression, can be
difficult to read and discuss as a survivor, a person of color, or a
student from a low-income background.

People on the
political left and the hipster-and-hip-hop side of the spectrum –
Thurston Moore, Chuck D – flipped their lids when Tipper Gore’s PMRC
tried to put warning labels on albums with sex and violence. Musicians,
music fans and liberals in general defended the rights of rockers like
Marilyn Manson and rappers like 2 Live Crew to rhyme about whatever they
wanted. It was all about freedom of speech back then.

Teenagers
and college students these days live in a world drenched in sex and
violence; if they have cable connection or a cell phone they’re exposed
to a vastly harsher and more profane world than the X’ers and Boomers or
Silents who either eagerly read or slept their way through their
Western civ requirements. Why start protecting students from Ovid in a
TMZ world?

So it’s not just the wrong way to go – it’s awful PR
for those of us who think literature and the liberal arts matter. You
are giving the reactionaries at Fox News – who hardly seem invested in
Sophocles or Suetonius – a cannon’s worth of ammo
against the “political correct” campus left. And you are treating some
of the greatest, most resonant, and, yes, most painful work in the
history of humanity as something we need to apologize for.

"Caught in the Pulpit" author Daniel Dennett on closeted atheist clergy and our new age of radical transparency

If
Daniel Dennett is anything, he is a champion of the facts. The
prominent philosopher of science is an advocate for hard-nosed
empiricism, and as a leading New Atheist he calls for naturalistic
explanations of religion. Dennett is also the co-author (along with
Linda LaScola) of the recently expanded and updatedCaught in the Pulpit: Leaving Faith Behind, which documents the stories of preachers and rabbis who themselves came to see…the facts.

Caught in the Pulpit is a close cousin to The Clergy Project,
an outreach effort to “current and former religious professionals who
no longer hold supernatural beliefs”—many of whom must closet their
newfound skepticism to preserve their careers and communities.

For
Dennett, closeted atheist clergy are not simply tragic figures, they
are harbingers of great things to come. Peppered amongst Caught in the Pulpit’s
character vignettes are mini-essays in which Dennett predicts a sea
change in religious doctrine and practice. Our digital information age,
he argues, is ushering in a “new world of universal transparency” where
religious institutions can no longer hide the truth. To survive in an
age of transparency, religions will need to come to terms with the
facts.

Dennett spoke recently with The Cubit about institutional transparency, the parallels between religious and atheistic fundamentalism, and the future of religion.

You
describe non-believing clergy as “canaries in a coal mine.” Why does
this group hold such significance for understanding the future of
religion?

I think that we are now entering a really
disruptive age in the history of human civilization, thanks to the new
transparency brought about by social media and the internet. It used to
be a lot easier to keep secrets than it is now.

In the March issue of Scientific American, Deb Roy and I compare this to the Cambrian Explosion.
The Cambrian Explosion happened 540 million years ago, when there was a
sudden, very dramatic explosion of different life forms in response to
some new change in the world. Oxford zoologist Andrew Parker argues that
the increased transparency of the ocean made eyesight possible, and
this changed everything: now predators could see prey, and prey could
see predators, and this set off an arms race of interactions. Well, we
think something similar is happening in human culture. Institutions—not
just religions but also universities, armies, corporations—are now faced
with how to change their fundamental structure and methods to deal with
the fact that everybody’s living in a glass house now.

Protecting
your inner workings is becoming very difficult; it’s very hard to keep
secrets. Religions have thrived in part because they were able to keep
secrets. They were able to keep secrets about other religions from their
parishioners, who were largely ignorant of what other people in the
world believed, and also keep secrets about their own inner workings and
their own histories, so that it was easy to have a sort of controlled
message that went out to people. Those days are over. You can go on the
Internet and access to all kinds of information. This is going to change
everything.

Sunday, May 10, 2015

The
founder of Mother's Day wouldn't have wanted you to buy those flowers
for mom. Or that card. Or those chocolates. In all likelihood, she
wouldn't have wanted you to celebrate the holiday at all.The fact that we will collectively spend nearly $20 billion on moms this year probably would have caused Anna Jarvis, the founder of Mother's Day, to throw her lunch on the floor like she reportedly did
in the early 1900s, when she found out that a department store in
Philadelphia was offering a Mother's Day special, according to Mental
Floss.

Jarvis -- a West Virginia woman who didn't even have children of her own, according to History.com
-- came up with the idea for a Mother's Day holiday, organizing the
first celebration at a Methodist church in 1908. Annoyed that most
American holidays were dedicated to honoring male achievements, Jarvis
started a letter-writing campaign to make it a national holiday,
involving wearing a white carnation, visiting your mother and maybe
going to church.

Her campaign worked, but not in the way she hoped: She never wanted Mother's Day to be the commercial holiday
it quickly came to be. (Although maybe she should have thought twice
about getting financing for the first celebration from the owner of
Wanamaker's, a major department store at the time.)

A 1924 story
published in the Miami Daily News and Metropolis detailed Jarvis's
distaste for what Mother's Day had become. It pretty much comes down to
this:

Consumerism stinks.

"Commercialization
of Mother's Day is growing every year," says she. "Since the movement
has spread to all parts of the world, many things have tried to attach
themselves because of its success."

Florists are the worst.

"The
red carnation has no connection with Mother's Day. Yet florists have
spread the idea that it should be worn for mother who has passed away.
This has boosted the sale of red carnations."

Candy makers are also the worst.

"Confectioners
put a white ribbon on a box of candy and advance the price just because
it's Mother's Day," she charges. "There is no connection between candy
and this day. It is pure commercialization."

"The
sending of a wire is not sufficient. Write a letter to your mother. No
person is too busy to do this. Any mother would rather have a line of
the worst scribble from her son or daughter than any fancy greeting card
or telegram."

So there you have it. Straight from the founder of Mother's Day herself.

Are these two “culture wars” issues really that similar?

Why
are reproductive rights losing while gay rights are winning? Indiana’s
attempt to enshrine opposition to gay marriage under the guise of
religious freedom provoked an immediate nationwide backlash. Meanwhile,
the Supreme Court has allowed religious employers to refuse insurance
coverage for birth control—not abortion, birth control—to female
employees; new laws are forcing abortion clinics to close; and absurd,
even medically dangerous restrictions are heaping up in state after
state. Except when the media highlight a particularly crazy claim by a
Todd Akin or Richard Mourdock, where’s the national outrage? Most
Americans are pro-choice, more or less; only a small minority want to
see abortion banned. When you consider, moreover, that one in three
women will have had at least one abortion by the time she reaches
menopause, and most of those women had parents, partners,
friends—someone—who helped them obtain it, the sluggish response to the
onslaught of restrictive laws must include many people who have
themselves benefited from safe and legal abortion.

The media
present marriage equality and reproductive rights as “culture war”
issues, as if they somehow went together. But perhaps they’re not as
similar as we think. Some distinctions:§ Marriage equality is
about love, romance, commitment, settling down, starting a family.
People love love! But marriage equality is also about tying love to
family values, expanding a conservative institution that has already
lost most of its coercive social power and become optional for millions.
(Marriage equality thus follows Pollitt’s law: Outsiders get access
when something becomes less valued, which is why women can be art
historians and African-Americans win poetry prizes.) Far from posing a
threat to marriage, as religious opponents claim, permitting gays to
marry gives the institution a much-needed update, even as it presents
LGBT people as no threat to the status quo: Instead of promiscuous child
molesters and lonely gym teachers, gays and lesbians are your neighbors
who buy Pottery Barn furniture and like to barbecue.

Reproductive
rights, by contrast, is about sex—sexual freedom, the opposite of
marriage—in all its messy, feckless glory. It replaces the image of
women as chaste, self-sacrificing mothers dependent on men with that of
women as independent, sexual, and maybe not so self-sacrificing. It
doesn’t matter that contraception is indispensable to modern life, that
abortion antedates the sexual revolution by thousands of years, that
plenty of women who have abortions are married, or that most (60
percent) who have abortions are already mothers. Birth control and
abortion allow women—and, to a lesser extent, men—to have sex without
punishment, a.k.a. responsibility. And our puritanical culture replies:
You should pay for that pleasure, you slut.

§ Same-sex marriage is
something men want. Lesbian couples account for the majority of
same-sex marriages, but even the vernacular “gay marriage” types it as a
male concern. That makes it of interest to everyone, because everything
male is of general interest. Though many of the groundbreaking
activists and lawyers who have fought for same-sex marriage are
lesbians, gay men have a great deal of social and economic power, and
they have used it, brilliantly, to mainstream the cause.

Reproductive
rights are inescapably about women. Pervasive misogyny means not only
that those rights are stigmatized—along with the women who exercise
them—but that men don’t see them as all that important, while women have
limited social power to promote them. And that power is easily
endangered by too close an identification with all but the most anodyne
version of feminism. There are no female CEOs pouring millions into
reproductive rights or threatening to relocate their businesses when a
state guts access to abortion. And with few exceptions, A-list celebs
steer clear.

Critics
say Pamela Geller’s event was provocative and arguably crossed the line
into hate speech – but protections afforded by the first amendment are
unique

The fatal shootings in Garland, Texas,
of two extremist gunmen as they attacked an anti-Islamist meeting was a
vivid reminder of the virtually unique protections afforded by the US
constitution to free speech, no matter how hate-filled or provocative,
according to prominent first amendment experts.

In many countries across Europe and around the world, Pamela Geller
and the American Freedom Defense Initiative, who organized the event in
Garland, might have fallen foul of hate speech laws such as the UK’s
1986 public order act or article 266(b) of Denmark’s criminal code.

Coming
just two months after the Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris, commenters
the world over have said Geller’s decision to stage the Texas cartoon
competition – participants were invited to draw the prophet Muhammad,
with a top prize of $10,000 – was clearly provocative and arguably
crossed the line into hate speech.

But
there was never any question of the Muhammad event being barred,
leading US constitutional scholars say, for the simple reason that the
first amendment offers an almost watertight protection of public speech.

Harvard
University law professor Laurence Tribe said the Garland attack
illustrated a major difference in free speech law between the US and
almost every other country in the world.“Most other nations
recognize a category of hateful speech that is likely to trigger outrage
and even retaliation, but the first amendment has for many decades been
interpreted to allow speakers like Pamela Geller to spread their
disturbing messages to the world at large,” Tribe said.

While some
aspects of US constitutional law are ambiguous or blurry, the first
amendment is crystal clear on this issue. The government is prohibited
from punishing hate speech or language that might incite lawlessness
unless the words are specifically and deliberately directed at a
particular target and likely imminently to trigger violence.

Given
all the legal hurdles that a prosecution would have to clear in order
to be successful, actions to block public events or censor hate-filled
publications are virtually extinct in modern America. Legal scholars
such as Tribe date the ascendancy of the first amendment in this area to
the 1969 case of Brandenburg v Ohio in which a Ku Klux Klan leader was
convicted under Ohio law for holding a rally with participants in full
Klan regalia parading around burning crosses and vowing “revengeance”
against the N-word and Jews.

Robert ReichSunday, April 26, 2015A
security guard recently told me he didn’t know how much he’d be earning
from week to week because his firm kept changing his schedule and his
pay. “They just don’t care,” he said.A traveler I met in the
Dallas Fort-Worth Airport last week said she’d been there eight hours
but the airline responsible for her trip wouldn’t help her find another
flight leaving that evening. “They don’t give a hoot,” she said.

Someone
I met in North Carolina a few weeks ago told me he had stopped voting
because elected officials don’t respond to what average people like him
think or want. “They don’t listen,” he said.What connects these dots? As I travel around America, I’m struck by how utterly powerless most people feel.

The
companies we work for, the businesses we buy from, and the political
system we participate in all seem to have grown less accountable. I hear
it over and over: They don’t care; our voices don’t count.

A
large part of the reason is we have fewer choices than we used to have.
In almost every area of our lives, it’s now take it or leave it.Companies
are treating workers as disposable cogs because most working people
have no choice. They need work and must take what they can get.

Although jobs are coming back from the depths of the Great Recession, the portion of the labor force
actually working remains lower than it’s been in over thirty years –
before vast numbers of middle-class wives and mothers entered paid work.

Which
is why corporations can get away with firing workers without warning,
replacing full-time jobs with part-time and contract work, and cutting
wages. Most working people have no alternative.

Two
gunmen were killed after they opened fire Sunday evening outside an
event hosted by an anti-Islam group in Garland, Tex., featuring cartoons
of the Prophet Muhammad, local officials said.

According to the
authorities, the two assailants shot a security guard and were, in turn, shot and killed by police officers.

Officials
did not name the gunmen or assign a motive for the attack. A
spokeswoman for the F.B.I. in Dallas said the agency was providing
investigative and bomb technician assistance to the Garland police.

The shooting began shortly before 7 p.m. outside the Curtis Culwell Center at an event organized by the American Freedom Defense Initiative, an anti-Islam organization based in New York.

“As
today’s Muhammad Art Exhibit event at the Curtis Culwell Center was
coming to an end,” the Facebook posting said, “two males drove up to the
front of the building in a car. Both males were armed and began
shooting at a Garland I.S.D. security officer.”

The
Garland Independent School District said in a statement that its
security officer, Bruce Joiner, was shot in the ankle and taken to a
hospital. He was later released.

The
police, fearing that the gunmen’s car might contain an explosive
device, dispatched a bomb squad and evacuated the center and nearby
businesses, including a Walmart.

The event included a contest for the best caricature of the Prophet Muhammad, with a $10,000 top prize.

Drawings
of the prophet are considered offensive in most interpretations of
Islam. In January, gunmen in Paris attacked the offices of Charlie
Hebdo, a French satirical newspaper known for printing caricatures of
the Prophet Muhammad, killing 12 people.

Gaiman, Art Spiegelman and Alison Bechdel on why comics are so controversial — and why they must be defended

When six writers withdrew in protest from PEN American Center’s annual fundraising gala
last week, they set off a long and lively discussion of free expression
and its limits. At issue is the Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of
Expression Courage Award that PEN is tonight bestowing on the French
satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, eight of whose staff members were
killed, along with four other people, when gunmen sent by the militant
Islamist group al-Qaida in Yemen assaulted their offices earlier this year. The dissenting six were soon joined by more than 200 other PEN members, who signed a letter
objecting to “enthusiastically rewarding” the magazine because they
consider its cartoons of the prophet Mohammed to be offensive to
Muslims.

But those six writers also left six
empty chairs at the event, chairs ordinarily occupied by well-known
literary figures who serve as “table hosts.” Over the weekend, six other
writers stepped forward to fill those seats. They include journalist
George Packer, “Reading Lolita in Tehran” author Azar Mafisi and Alain
Mabanckou, a Congolese-born French author who will present the award to
Charlie Hebdo’s editor-in-chief.

The other three are all
celebrated comics artists: Art Spiegelman, Neil Gaiman and Alison
Bechdel. Spiegelman, author of the legendary graphic novel “Maus,” had
read that some PEN members had floated the idea of standing up and
turning their backs when the award was presented, or hissing. “I
thought, that’s obscene,” he said on the telephone yesterday. “I talked
to a few friends, and Alison and Neil Gaiman were able and willing to
come. Matt Groening [creator of "The Simpsons"] tried to come but he was
in production this week. I thought it would be great to have someone to
shout out, ‘Cartoonists’ lives matter!’ when the award is being given
if anybody dared hiss it.”

Cartoonists tend to stick together
because they have to; as Gaiman points out, their work is
disproportionately singled out for suppression both abroad and in the
U.S., while at the same time often regarded as not “serious” enough to
deserve a full-throttle defense. “I spent 12 years on the board of the
Comic Book Legal Defense Fund,” Gaiman told me, “for which I was
fighting on a daily basis to keep people who had written, drawn,
published, sold or owned comics out of prison and from losing their
livelihood for having drawn something that upset somebody.”

Cartoonists
are particularly vulnerable when addressing Islam, as some (but not
all) Muslims believe that it is sacrilegious to depict their prophet
visually in any way. This is not a threat limited to Europe. Earlier
this year, CNN reported that the Seattle cartoonist Molly Norris is
still in hiding, four years after she attracted death threats for
drawing non-satirical images of Mohammed on a teacup and thimble and
domino. Her name recently appeared on the most-wanted list of the
al-Qaida magazine Inspire.

The
Times article quoted a host of Clinton confidants characterizing
Clinton's economic policy record as a populist agenda akin to that of
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). That includes a view that the ongoing
accumulation of massive wealth at the top of the spectrum is holding
back the broader economy.

In a meeting with economists
this year, Mrs. Clinton intensely studied a chart that showed income
inequality in the United States. The graph charted how real wages,
adjusted for inflation, had increased exponentially for the wealthiest
Americans, making the bar so steep it hardly fit on the chart.

Mrs.
Clinton pointed at the top category and said the economy required a
“toppling” of the wealthiest 1 percent, according to several people who
were briefed on Mrs. Clinton’s policy discussions but could not discuss
private conversations for attribution.

The Clinton
campaign told HuffPost they could not confirm the precise language of
the quote, but did not distance themselves from its populist essence.

“No
one in the room remembers this quote, and it doesn't sound like
language she'd use," a Clinton aide emailed to HuffPost. "That said, our
economy was nearly toppled in 2008 because the deck was stacked for
those at the top and Hillary Clinton has said she's running to reshuffle
the deck for everyday Americans so that it doesn’t topple again and
people can actually get ahead. It’s a belief at the core of her entire
career fighting and at the core of this campaign.”

But while
Clinton may be focusing on the wealthy, the Times article also seemed to
underscore a lingering tension between some of her top advisers and
Warren herself.

One anonymous Clinton adviser gave the Times a
research memo championing Clinton's career in economic policy making,
while dismissing Warren as a "footnote." Gene Sperling, a long-time
economic adviser to Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama appeared to
criticize Warren as an ineffective attack dog.

Physicians
for Human Rights (PHR) again urged the U.S. Department of Justice to
investigate the American Psychological Association’s (APA) complicity in
the CIA torture program, following a new report in today’s New York Times. Internal emails obtained by Times
reporter James Risen clearly show that the APA secretly modified its
ethics policy to endorse psychologist participation in torture, with the
aid of CIA and White House personnel.

“This calculated
undermining of professional ethics is unprecedented in the history of
U.S. medical practice and shows how the CIA torture program corrupted
other institutions in our society," said Donna McKay, PHR's executive
director. “Psychologists must never use their knowledge of human
behavior to harm or undermine individuals. The Justice Department must
look into any crimes or violations that may have been committed. It’s
equally critical for psychologists to reclaim the principles of their
profession and to reassert the values of human rights in psychology.”

PHR
has repeatedly called on the APA to clarify its ties to the CIA torture
program and its architects, including CIA contract psychologists James
Mitchell (a former APA member) and Bruce Jessen. PHR said it looked
forward to the findings of an independent investigation
into the APA’s collusion with the CIA expected in summer 2015. In the
meantime, there is sufficient evidence of wrongdoing to warrant a
Department of Justice investigation.

PHR first called for an investigation into APA ethics policies in 2009, after a leaked APA email listserv
revealed that most members of the secret 2005 APA Presidential Task
Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS) had U.S.
military and intelligence affiliations. Since then, additional email
disclosures and related analysis – including articles by Risen
– have exposed coordinated efforts by APA, CIA, and White House
officials to bring key portions of APA ethics policy in line with the
legal and operational needs of the George Bush-era torture program.“By
revising its ethics policies in order to align with the CIA’s torture
practices, the American Psychological Association effectively endorsed
psychologist participation in CIA torture,” said Widney Brown, PHR’s
director of programs. “This supported the Bush administration’s spurious
claim that brutal interrogation practices were ‘safe, effective, and
legal.’ The APA’s complicity is a betrayal of the fundamental duty of
all health professionals – to do no harm.”

Risen’s latest article discloses the purpose behind the changes made to the APA’s ethics policy, drawing on a new analysis
by a team of independent psychological, medical, and human rights
experts. The APA’s 2005 PENS Task Force policy revisions reversed a
longstanding policy to specifically endorse psychologist research into
and monitoring of interrogations – including defining “what constitutes cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.” This language comported with the then still-classified Department of Justice “torture memos,”
which concluded that certain techniques would not violate the ban on
“cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment” if subjected to medical
monitoring. Yet, at the time, the CIA Office of Medical Services
objected to playing such a role. This legal indemnification strategy was
therefore written into APA ethics policy, with the direct involvement
of the CIA and a former behavioral science advisor for the Bush White
House.

Since 2005, PHR has documented the systematic use of
psychological and physical torture of national security detainees by
U.S. personnel in a series of groundbreaking reports. Dr. Stephen Soldz, lead author of the APA email analysis referenced in the New York Times
article, is anti-torture advisor to PHR and has collaborated on several
of the reports. PHR has repeatedly called for an end to the torture and
ill-treatment of detainees by the United States, a federal
investigation into the role of health professionals in the U.S. torture
program, and full criminal and professional accountability for any
health professionals found to have participated.

Physicians
for Human Rights (PHR) is a New York-based advocacy organization that
uses science and medicine to stop mass atrocities and severe human
rights violations. Learn more here.

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson